How are you syncing to Time Machine over WiFi?

We bought an Airport Extreme Base Station to for among other reasons to hang a USB drive off of it to sync our MBA. But....that doesn't work, I guess Apple pulled the feature. How are you doing it? Or do we have to resort to just plugging in occasionally? Which, I feel, defeats the point behind Time Machine.

Everyone is going to boo and hiss, but I'm using a DroboFS attached to my AE. I set up a partition to do my time machine backups to and then left it to do what it does. It's not always the fastest beast, but it has been transparent and effortless to set up.

I share a drive on my Mac Mini that it and my kids' Mac use for time machine backups. It silently stopped working once for the remote mac, but I noticed and started it over. It had to make a full backup, and time machine couldn't find the old backups, even though I could browse to the files in Finder.

Why do you think that Apple have removed the Time Machine functionality from a USB disk attached to an Airport Extreme base station? I'm using it right now (over WiFi) from both Lion and Mountain Lion...

You may need to create a user on the AE, and on the Mac, open the AE disk in Finder then open the Time Machine system preference pane and see if the disk appears.

My MacPro is connected via gigabit to the AE, with one of its hard drives designated as a backup disk for the laptops.

This, except in my case it's an iMac, and the backup drive hangs off a USB port. It's partitioned into an area for the laptop to backup onto wirelessly, and then the iMac itself backs up to the other partition. This setup has worked great for over a year.

After years of fighting with Time Machine over WiFi, I finally just plugged the damn USB drive into my MBP (actually into the USB hub of my Dell Monitor that I plug into every day at work), and I've never been happier.

GbE is supposed to faster than USB 2.0 blah blah blah blah, but the simple fact is that my ~2-3 GB backups via USB now take only 5 minutes, whereas they took 20-30 minutes over GbE and ∞ over WiFi.

My backups are always 2-3 GB because I use Thunderbird for my work email, and TB uses ginormous monolithic files for each mailbox, so every time I get a new message my inbox file changes.

FWIW I have the latest Airport Extreme with a Samsung USB HDD attached, and Time Machine backups work pretty well except for the weekly (cannot find Time Machine volume error) which disconnecting the Wifi and reconnecting sometimes fixes.

For now it's good enough as I'm also backing up with SuperDuper and Backblaze so Time Machine is a backup of another backup. If TM was the only backup I had, I'm not sure I'd trust it over WiFi to an Airport Extreme, and would've probably got a Time Capsule instead.

Why do you think that Apple have removed the Time Machine functionality from a USB disk attached to an Airport Extreme base station? I'm using it right now (over WiFi) from both Lion and Mountain Lion...

You may need to create a user on the AE, and on the Mac, open the AE disk in Finder then open the Time Machine system preference pane and see if the disk appears.

Here's closure ....it worked! In the AE I had to turn on disk sharing and have the TM drive all ready and plugged in. To avoid the whole account/login thing, I selected 'Share using device password', instead of the two other account specific options. So it just logs-in by clicking the disk in Finder. I didn't do it, but I confirmed I could add the TM drive as a 'Start up item' in OSX so it just auto-loads the TM drive whenever we login to our MacBook Air at which point TM kicks in.

I have a Western Digital MyBook Live, which is an external hard drive with an ethernet port (and nothing else). It supports Time Machine backups out of the box. It handles my PowerBook on 10.5 and iMac on 10.7 without any problems (haven't had to do a full system restore, but everything else works as expected).

Although in general I'm not too worried about network based attacks and I don't believe in firewalls, I never felt comfortable having all my files available over the network with nothing more than an Airport Extreme guarding them.

I'm using a Seagate GoFlex Home plugged into an Airport Extreme for backups of an iMac and a MacBook Air. Everything worked right out of the box (though the initial backup of the iMac took four days!! ).

Not the most advanced setup, and I didn't bother trying to tweak anything for partitions or whatnot; but we're a couple months in now, and everything seems to be going fine.

Backing up my laptop to a Linux server running the latest version of netatalk. Had one issue where the backups were corrupted so in addition I have a shell script that also syncs my user's folders with rsync over ssh until I get around doing something more reliable (which will probably be a dedicated USB disk).